Playa Esterillos, Costa Rica
Bird of the Day: Bare-throated Tiger-Heron
Playa Esterillos, Costa Rica
Author: Seth Inman
Throwback Thursday: Bog
Photo credit: BU Dining Services
About this time two years ago, I came across the YouTube video featured in the #throwback Thursday post below. Hope you enjoy it, especially in light of this week’s post on peatlands!
Original Post Date: December 28, 2012
Earlier this week I wrote about an entirely different sort of swamp. This brief post is about a topic much more in tune with the holiday season: cranberries. Grown in bogs with layers of peat, sand, gravel, and clay, cranberries are native to North American wetlands (our readers across the pond will probably know the European variety of the fruit as lingonberries). In the United States they are primarily grown in Massachusetts, New Jersey, Oregon, Washington, and Wisconsin (ordered alphabetically, not by output). Something not many people may know is that these cranberry bogs are cyclically flooded with vast amounts of water every season; some might worry over the constant waste of this precious liquid in areas of major cranberry production, or the contamination of water tables with pesticides and fertilizers common to agricultural use.
But I am about to tell you about some of the advantages cranberry-growers have over other industrial agriculturalists in terms of their water utilization. Why will I share this with you? Well, cranberry sauce features prevalently in the traditions of recent holidays, namely Thanksgiving and Christmas (and was thus probably consumed in an overwhelming majority of American households at least once in the past 60 days), plus my grandparents swear by cranberry juice, but I also recently found out that cranberries–and the water they are flooded with for harvesting–make for excellent art, or sport. What I never would have guessed is that Red Bull would be the one to show me this; just watch the video below:
Order of the Falcon
Jason Koski/Cornell University Photography
A few weeks ago, while visiting Cornell University for two days, President Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson, in addition to giving the talk I briefly posted about, also bestowed the Icelandic Order of the Falcon upon a librarian I know. Patrick Stevens, curator of the Fiske Icelandic Collection in the Rare and Manuscript Collection of Kroch Library at Cornell, helped me find resources while I conducted research for my honors thesis in history.
Always friendly and offering helpful advice when I came in every day in the summer of 2013 to look at old texts in the RMC reading room, Patrick also read a couple drafts of my work toward the end of my writing process. Continue reading
Are You Listening?
Conservation International’s new campaign, Nature Is Speaking, has released various short films from the perspective of different elements of nature voiced by an actor or actress: Harrison Ford is the Ocean, Lupita Nyong’o is a Flower, Edward Norton is the Soil. The organization’s “humanifesto” reads,
Nature doesn’t need people. People need nature.
Human beings are part of nature.
Nature is not dependent on human beings to exist.
Human beings, on the other hand, are totally
dependent on nature to exist.
The growing number of people on the planet
and how we live here is going to determine the future of nature.
And the future of us.
Nature will go on, no matter what.
It will evolve
The question is, will it be with us or without us?
Xandari’s Latest Dozen+ Pysanky
As my on-site time with Xandari wound down for the year early this week, I worked to make as many pysanky for the gift shop as possible, since an ornithological expedition in Jamaica will be taking up the first couple months of the new year. In the photo on the right, you can see that I finally got to one of the patterns I’d brainstormed when first starting this project, as well as a repetition of the Alajuelan soccer team insignia egg. Since the little tree for hanging the eggs in the gift shop is pretty full at sixteen eggs already, most of these eggs will stay in the office until an egg is sold or eggs are rotated.
Two adaptations of earlier patterns I developed and another soccer-themed egg, this time for Heredia’s team.
I’m hoping all these eggs, some of which directly reference Xandari and others Continue reading
And the Winners Are…
Employees and guests at Xandari have voted over the last two weeks, and now we have our final fourteen: two winners from each grade, and four from 6th grade. Thank you to those of our readers who took the time to vote in our selection process as well!
Today the students had a Continue reading
Xandari’s Holiday Tree is Up and Running
A homemade “loomi” lamp
Like any other tree acquired this time of year, Xandari’s holiday tree had to be put on the roof of a car — in this case, the resort’s golfcart — to transport it up to the lobby area from its site of construction. We snaked an LED “hose” through most of the paper lanterns in the bamboo structure, and now we have balsa-wood bird ornaments made by Costa Rican artists (these birds normally hang in our gift shop). Finally, I made a modular paper lamp recycled from old manila folders (template and how-to pending, but the lamp is basically a DIY Loomi light).
Tomorrow, when I finish the second loomi tree “star,” I’ll put up photos of the smaller tree that Edwin and I made for the Xandari Spa.
Bosque del Cabo and Xandari
A Yellow-headed Caracara raising its crest at Bosque
I’ve posted before on the beauty of Bosque del Cabo and some of the wildlife that my family and I spotted when we were there just about a month ago, but at the time I didn’t touch on the complementarity of the coastal rainforest nature lodge with Xandari Resort in the Central Valley, where I’ve been based the last six months.
My first experience of the compatibility between Bosque del Cabo and Xandari was vicarious. One of my good friends at Cornell knew that I had lived in Costa Rica and asked for advice on places to stay for his parents and younger sister over spring break (unfortunately, he had to stay in Ithaca for varsity athletics). Of course, my first recommendation was Xandari Continue reading
Bird of the Day: Neotropical Cormorant (Playa Esterillos, Costa Rica)
Bird of the Day: Black-hooded Antshrike
female – Carara National Park, Costa Rica
Murals at Cornell’s Lab of Ornithology
Video by Lindsay France/University Photography
This past spring, naturalist, writer, and artist James Prosek completed the Wall of Silhouettes on the north wall of the Lab’s visitor center. As you can see from the video above, this mural is all in black and white, and shows the life-size, hand-painted silhouettes of 170 birds in different habitats, accompanied by numbers like those in a field guide to represent the relationship between us and nature and one of the ways in which people connect with birds.
A mural by artist Jane Kim planned for the wall facing Prosek’s paintings is scheduled to be completed next November, and will feature representatives from all 231 bird families, Continue reading
Bird of Thanksgiving: Great Curassow
female – Osa Peninsula, Costa Rica
Sneak Peek at Xandari’s Upcoming Holiday Tree
The Raxa Collective Holiday tree at Cardamom County, 2012.
Two years ago, the Raxa Collective team designed a new kind of conical decoration to replace the traditional pine tree at Cardamom County, one of Raxa Collective’s properties in Kerala, India. Pictured left, this tree received many compliments from employees and guests alike, was considered a success all around, and came out again last year with some new ornaments at Cardamom County. For the last several years, Xandari has relied on a small palm tree from the gardens here as the holiday ornament, but the resort has been looking for alternatives. When I showed the team what might now be considered the “Raxa Collective tree,” they were immediately excited and started planning to build one straight away.
And so it was that Edwin (José Luis‘s brother) and I found ourselves in two of the several bamboo groves on Xandari property with a saw and a machete on Tuesday. We started out with a simple sketch design of our planned tree based on the images we’d seen of the Indian version, then set out to cut a couple bamboo poles for the construction phase. We knew we’d need three 2.1 meter poles for the pyramid sides, so we got them from one type of medium-thickness bamboo. Then we needed twenty-one rods of seven different lengths (see design photo above), so we went to a grove of thinner type of bamboo. Continue reading
Bird of the Day: Black-bellied Plover (Playa Esterillos, Costa Rica)
Bird of the Day: Long-billed Hermit
Osa Peninsula, Costa Rica
Migrating Wildlife Needs More Than Merely Parks
via the New York Times.
According to an in-depth atlas project being undertaken by the Wyoming Migration Initiative, many species of wild ungulates (hoofed mammals) require more land than what is currently encompassed in wilderness reserves. Certain areas that are under private ownership or designated as mixed use government lands are also key to the survival of species like the bighorn sheep (whose migration routes are to the left), mule deer, elk, and others.
Bird of the Day: Northern Barred-Woodcreeper
Carara National Park, Costa Rica
An Impromptu Tacacorí CUBs Art Contest
A crudely-formed bird (airplane?) mosaic, photographed from the school roof
Last week, after many delays, I was able to get down to the school in Tacacorí and take photos of all the CUBs rocks that the students had painted. I used my camera (rather than my phone) and a borrowed tripod so that the pictures would be better quality and also more standardized. The result was 146 photos of rocks. I don’t know the exact number of students at the school, but I know that fifth-graders in particular were impatient to take their rocks home before I photographed them, because there were only a handful of specimens left last week.
Unfortunately for those students who didn’t wait until I told them they could Continue reading
President of Iceland to Speak at Cornell in T-minus Two Hours
In less than two hours, Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson, the fifth president of Iceland, will deliver a talk at Cornell’s Einaudi Center, as part of the Foreign Policy Distinguished Speaker Series.
Since I have a very personal academic connection to Iceland, I will be viewing the live stream of the speech at CornellCast’s webpage, and I invite you to do the same! The site helpfully provides a countdown of the talk for those of us in diverse time zones. Continue reading
Introduced Species in the Galápagos
Feral goats on Isabela Island. Photo by Galápagos National Park Service.
Yesterday I wrote about the case of the North American beaver being purposefully introduced to Argentinian Patagonia for a business venture and having severe unintended consequences on the environment in both Chile and Argentina. Most of us think of Patagonia as a pretty faraway and isolated place, and its location so far down the southern hemisphere merits that. The Galápagos Islands are another place geographically apart from most of us–that distance accounts for the specialized evolution that took place in the archipelago over millennia.
The isolation of the Galápagos from the rest of the world for so long, and the relatively small size of the islands, means that it is especially vulnerable to opportunistic species that can become invasive. In the same way that the Canadian beavers had no natural predators in Patagonia, common domesticated goats, when introduced to different islands in the Galápagos by sailors centuries ago, were able to roam and multiply, which was the travelers’ goal Continue reading
Organikos 